Jon Gertner

Articles from Contributor

In the years immediately after the breakup of the Bell System in 1984, a question arose: What was the purpose of this company—and what was the purpose of its laboratory, arguably the finest in the world—going forward?

In technology, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure. That was why Mervin Kelly, the president of Bell Labs, let many members of his research department roam free, sometimes without …

In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in enormous brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses …